Followed a week of daily visits, during which she talked and he listened. Temperature dropped to ninety-nine point three. Wound in arm drained away its poison. She grew nervous about her children left alone with the servants; ran down to Sunflowers for the day; found chaotic idleness; stayed the night; straightened things out; returned to town. At the end of the second week, her father pronounced his patient definitely out of danger; persuaded her to leave London. She yielded hesitatingly, realizing for the first time the handicaps of reduced income—lack of car, lack of governess for the children, of efficient servants; torn between her love for the man and her duty to his home. . . . Peter himself, during that first fortnight, was too ill for emotion. To be in bed, to be under a solid roof, to be washed—these sensations contented him. He rather liked waking at night to hear rain outside, turning to sleep with the thought, “Well, I’m not in that anyway.” He liked having his meals brought to him on clean china, the sounds of women’s voices. He experienced a profound relief at the absence of danger. . . . But as Peter passed from illness to convalescence, he grew aware of new dangers. These dangers were manifold, and each terrifying. Never, at the Front, had he known fear as he knew fear at home. There was the Fear in Sleep—a horror which woke him, sodden with sweat, from visions of Lindsay still dying in Trônes Wood, still dying but not yet dead. . . . There was the Fear in Daylight—a visionless misery, an immense black cap which the soul donned or doffed at its own bitter will. While that Fear lasted, the soul under the cap prayed ingratiatingly for death. . . . There was the Fear of the Future, in which the future held no hope beyond the present: and the Fear of the Present, when the present held no hope save the future. . . . There was the Fear of Time—where time hung dead through eternity or spun so fast that none might accomplish a second’s labour between his cradle and his grave. . . . There was the Fear of Pain, and the Fear of Poverty, the Fear of being Sent Back to the Front, and the Fear of having to Stop at Home: but strangest, strongest of all the fears Peter learned in those first days was the Fear of Consumption. He used to lie for hours remembering Rolleston’s story of the gassed Canadian, hearing Rolleston’s words about tubercle, till every little cough seemed a warning of death: then the Fear in Daylight would come to him, whispering, “Perhaps that is best,” and the Fear of Poverty would mutter, “There’ll be the insurance money for them if you die.” . . .